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Books
currently recommended by Salley Vickers:
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MY
FIVE FAVOURITE ROMANTIC NOVELS
A
Romantic novel is not merely about love but embraces the
idea that human emotion is of supreme moral value. All Jane
Austen novels fill that bill but for choice I hover
between 'Emma' and 'Persuasion'. Both exemplify
the capacity of true affection to conquer adversity and
shape destiny. If 'Emma' wins by a whisker it is because
the book has such structural brilliance; the occasion when
the heroine faces her own cruelty to Miss Bates - the unprepossessing
spinster whom Emma has, in the shadow of her own distress,
mocked - generates the moment when she suspends self-interest
to spare the feelings of Mr Knightly - the man she has come
to recognise she loves while still unaware that the love
is reciprocated - exhilarating testimony to the power of
love to develop character.
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'The
Ambassadors', by Henry James, concerns the etiolated
Strether, who is sent to Paris to disentangle a young American
from an unsuitable liaison with an older married French woman.
The novel charts the gradual realigning of Strether's sympathies
away from the controlling American mother, whose 'ambassador'
he is and with whom he has an implied 'understanding'; so that,
finally, it is he, as his own
limited vision and emotional scope are challenged, whose life
is radically and irreversibly altered by the vulnerable and
alluring Madame de Vionnet. |
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'Chance'
was the novel which made Joseph Conrad famous and it
too celebrates an enigmatic and equivocal heroine. Flora de
Barral is the daughter of a convicted embezzler and the novel
explores her marriage to the shy but emotionally discerning
Captain Anthony. Conrad allowed the plot to be led by Flora,
and it is this willingness to subdue his
own choices to those of his central creation which gives the
book its emotional authority. It is a novel in which, against
the opposition of seeming fate, the natural affinity of lovers
triumphs.
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The
elective affinities of lovers triumphs munificently in 'Love
in the Time of Cholera', Marquez's astonishing and
generous vindication of the capacity of real love to endure.
The final consummation, on a boat, of the love of the now elderly
couple whose lifelong passion forms the narrative web, is both
moving and intensely erotic. |
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Last,
my personal indulgence, 'The Pursuit of Love' by Nancy
Mitford: the engagingly erratic heroine, Linda, and her
final discovery of love in the person of the seductive Fabrice
is the stuff of fantasy yet its wit and verve make it a classic.
Like Emma's heroic suspension of self-interest or the scene
where Marquez's aged lovers achieve their consummation, the
moment when Fabrice rolls up Linda's mink coat and throws
it into the wastepaper basket, replacing it with the sable
coat he has bought her, remains to my mind one of the most
irresistible and liberating in all literature.
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To
buy any of the books mentioned on this website,
click on the phrase 'buy from amazon'.
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